Economy

Twitter Can Tell Whether Your Community Is Happy or Not

The results of a study of 82 million tweets from 1,300 counties.
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Governments from the local to the national are increasingly interested in "wellbeing," that subjective notion that's harder to measure than per capita income or GDP, that comes closer to capturing what we more vaguely think of as happiness. We'd all like to have it: quality of life, life satisfaction, fulfillment.

As researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Michigan State University put it in a recent study on the topic, with a technological twist: